Site Mobile Navigation

A Monitor of Health, Worn Lightly

Maybe you’ve heard. We Americans are not, ahem, the very models of physical fitness. We’re overweight, underexercised and underslept.

We don’t need more studies to remind us that being so fat, lazy and tired is bad for our mood, productivity and health. What we need is to change our ways.

Where there’s a will, there’s a gadget. Jawbone, the maker of sleek Bluetooth earpieces and colorful wireless portable speakers, now offers a product that’s only distantly related to its predecessors: the Up wristband ($100). The tiny motion sensors inside are designed to monitor your activity and sleep, and, by confronting you with a visual record of your habits, inspire you to do better.

This isn’t a new idea. The active ingredient is the same one found in previous “Get healthier” gadgets like the FitBit, Philips DirectLife and Nike+iPod: an accelerometer, a motion sensor like the one in a Wii remote control.

The Up bracelet tries to improve on those devices in two important ways. First, its textured rubber exterior, available in a variety of colors and wrist sizes, is waterproof up to (or, rather, down to) three feet. The idea is that you can wear the band 24/7, even when you swim or take a shower.

Second, the Up band uses an iPhone app as its brains and screen. Brilliant! You’re already carrying around a computer with a colorful touch screen; why shouldn’t it work with your glorified pedometer? (An Android version is in the works.)

The band contains a metal spine; it’s flexible but always returns to its closed oval shape when you let go. It’s not a complete circle. It’s more like an overgrown C — the ends shoot past and overlap each other. On one end, there’s a clickable metal button and a couple of tiny indicator lights. On the other, a tiny removable cap conceals the Up’s connector to your iPhone: a headphone minijack.

Yes, that’s right: the Up band connects to your iPhone through its headphone jack. That’s both its most ingenious idea and its most idiotic.

Relying on the headphone jack means that the Up band can, in theory, communicate with any phone brand. But it’s not a wireless connection, when it screams out to be wireless. Jawbone’s earpiece and portable speakers are models for clever use of Bluetooth; why on earth can’t your bracelet send its data to your phone wirelessly?

The answer, according to the company, is that Bluetooth would shorten the band’s 10-day battery life.

Still, that design is a crushing disappointment. Now, several times a day, you’re supposed to take the band off your arm, remove its cap, insert the plug into your phone’s headphone jack, open the app, tap a Sync button to open the Sync screen, tap another Sync button to start the sync, and wait while the latest activity data gets sent from the bracelet to your phone. Then, after the sync, put everything back together and back on your arm.

Photo

Credit
Stuart Goldenberg

The plugging-in business just feels ancient and wrong. It means you have to take off your bracelet. It means you’ll lose the tiny cap. And get this: the band doesn’t even charge in that manner. To charge the band, you’re supposed to connect it to a tiny proprietary USB cable that’s plugged into a computer. You’ll lose that cable, too.

If you do manage to sync the band to your phone, you see a graph of your health activity, represented by colorful bars.

One shows physical activity, as measured in steps, distance and calories tallied by the band. (I was disappointed not to get any credit for a 90-minute bike ride. It was certainly exercise, but of course my wrist didn’t move much. The company says that the current version is tailored for running and walking, but that you can record other kinds of activity — swimming, yoga, rowing machines, biking — manually. The app can also record your runs, hikes or bike rides using the GPS function.)

If you need further inspiration, the app also lists Challenges offered by fitness companies: to get an extra hour of sleep, to walk 100,000 steps this week and so on. The challenges from dailyfeats.com let you earn real-world discount coupons from local merchants or donations to nonprofits — an excellent additional incentive.

Maybe the best motivator is the sedentary-time alarm. You can set the band to vibrate, cellphone-style, every time you haven’t budged for, let’s say, an hour. It’s an appalling, visceral reminder of how much time you spend sitting there, motionless.

Like the FitBit and some other products, the Up band also tries to make a graph of your sleep patterns by tracking your unconscious movements: deep sleep, light sleep and lying awake. You have to press the metal button on the end to let it know that you’re going to bed, though, which is a little odd. Shouldn’t it be able to sense when you’ve gone to sleep?

The band can also wake you with a vibration. In fact, its Smart Alarm feature tries to wake you when you’re in the lightest phase of your sleep cycle, to avoid the grogginess of waking from a deep sleep. You set an alarm time; if the band senses that you’re nearly awake anyway within 30 minutes beforehand, it rouses you early.

It’s difficult to believe that you’ll actually feel more refreshed with less sleep, but that’s the theory; online, a fair number of people say that it works. In any case, there’s great value in an alarm that wakes you with a silent vibration. At least, whoever’s sleeping next to you will certainly find great value in it.

The Up band is also supposed to help you eat better, but its approach is minimalist: you use the phone to take a picture of every meal. That’s it. The wristband has no involvement. There’s no calorie tracking, no portion control, no guidance whatsoever.

The company suggests that public humiliation is the key. The Up app lets you connect to other Up band owners you may know: your family and friends, for example. Each day, you can compare your own activity, sleep and food records with theirs, side-by-side on a graph on the phone. The idea is that if you’re being watched by people whose opinion matters, you’ll take better care of yourself.

It’s hard to argue with that premise. But how many people do you know who own Up bands, who might become part of your network?

All of this would be much more compelling if the phone software weren’t so completely baffling. The graph might say “24%” for food. Percent of what? There are no fewer than three different app screens that show your friends’ progress, scrolling like Facebook updates; what’s the difference? Why won’t the app work in airplane mode? Few people will be able to figure out what the heck is going on with this app.

The Up band is something, but it could be so much more. Fewer bugs. Simpler software. A wireless link. The ability to track other kinds of activity besides walking. A less crude diet manager. Compatibility with other phones.

The company says that improvements will be coming soon. For now, the heart and hardware are in the right place — but the software has nowhere to go but up.

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on November 10, 2011, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Monitor Of Health, Worn Lightly. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe